Meteor explodes over Russia, injuring hundreds

As everyone was watching a large body called 2012 DA14, which is heading for a close approach to Earth today, a far smaller body exploded in a spectacular fireball over Russia's Ural region. Although it's not yet clear whether any pieces of the meteor survived to land on Earth, the large booms caused by its disintegration shattered glass, resulting in hundreds of injuries, though no reported deaths.

According to the BBC, both the Royal Astronomical Society and the European Space Agency have stated that the explosion and the meteor expected to pass within 18,000km of Earth on Friday are unrelated. The the Russian Academy of Sciences said the rock was about 10 tonnes and entered the atmosphere at about 54,000km/h (about 33,500mph) before breaking up in a spectacular explosion 30km above the Earth's surface. The New York Timesreports that a local Russian official is claiming that an impact crater has been identified, which would indicate that a significant piece of the rock remained intact to reach the surface.

Russia Today has collected a series of videos taken in the vicinity of the explosion. Two appear to show the explosion itself, and the remainder of the clips provide a sense of just how significant the explosion was for those on the ground.

Russia Today's video collection of the meteor's explosion.

UPDATE: Nature News is reporting that the Russian event was the largest in over a century. It quotes an astronomer who's used two infrasound (below the range of human hearing) receivers in the area as part of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty monitoring system to calculate the specifics of the event. Her calculations indicate that the object was 15m across and about 40 tonnes (far larger than the estimate above). The energy released by this object would be hundreds of kilotonnes—a figure that would make the North Koreans green with envy.